Thursday, December 10, 2009

Washington State federal legislators and candidates

I used this website http://www.uselections.com/wa/wa.htm to send the below email to Washington State's United States Senators and Representatives and to announced candidates for those offices in the 2010 elections.

I think that plaintiffs' lawyers and their activities are an impediment to economic recovery, are an obstacle to health care cost reduction, and undermine business ethics.

I am an Alabama resident who has objected in a class action lawsuit against Expedia, Inc. that is pending in the King County Superior Court. The past several days I have sent the below form of emails to county commissioners and to Superior Court judges in Washington State in which I am highly critical of the settlement agreement approved by the judge in the Expedia case and argue that action is needed to be taken against the plaintiffs' lawyers as a source of the country's health care cost problems and by reason of how they impair economic recovery, job creation and government revenue raising.

I am writing you this email for you to consider in your position as a high level elected official in Washington State and/or as candidate for the same, and to try to make the same an issue in the next election.

I am a resident of the State of Alabama and I have sent the below email to your county's Superior Court judge(s) and other Washington State Superior Court judges.

Why am I bothering to tell you this?

Our country is struggling to get out of an extremely bad recession; our federal, state and local lawmakers are contemplating more job stimulus programs, finding ways to reduce health care costs, and other additional governmental action, to try get our economy back on track; further, governments are desperate for revenues to cover large budget shortfalls.

You have something in your backyard you should take a look at. You can begin to do so by reading the below email to the Superior Court judges. It is specifically about a $9,500,000 mindless waste of funds that one Washington State Superior Court judge has sanctioned (which waste of economic resources is significantly greater that the stated $9,500,000 amount), and that judges around the country are multiplying thousands of times over. These amounts go to line the pockets of persons (plaintiffs' lawyers) who use their resources to block sensible medical malpractice reform (and the health care cost reductions that can come from that) and who otherwise broadly propagate activities that are an indefensible tax and exaction on business that impedes the economic recovery and job creation, which in turn keeps your government from getting revenues it needs.

You may not be a federal or state lawmaker or a judge who can do something directly about the plaintiffs' lawyers but you are a local official who can be informed about the burdens they place on the economy, on business recovery, and on your government getting needed revenues. You are in a position to register your views with state legislators and judges and other local persons of influence with whom you come in contact.

I, as a citizen, am complaining strenuously against the attempted governmental takeover of health care that will increase health care costs and will impair economic recovery and also against the trillions of dollars of increased government spending and debilitating tax increases in the name of stimulus that have taken place or that are in the works. While I am complaining about those, I want to complain about why action is not being taken against the plaintiffs' lawyers as a source of the country's health care cost problems and how they impair economic recovery and job creation and government revenue raising.

I hope you agree with my views and will register your own accordingly.

Thank you for your attention.

Sincerely,Robert Shattuck

[Form of email sent December 3rd and 4th to Washington State Superior Court judges]

I think the below email to Judge Benton is self-explanatory of why I am sending you a copy of the email. I hope you will give due consideration to the points I make in the email and perhaps discuss the same with other judges in Washington State.

Plaintiffs' counsel has sent me your signed Order Awarding Attorneys' Fees, Costs and Incentive Awards in In re Expedia Taxes and Fees Litigation, in which you awarded the plaintiffs' counsel $9,587,096.11, which includes $412,903.89 in expenses.

I have read your order and the justification you set out for the attorneys' fees.

With all due respect, your Honor, I consider your order to be a mindless action based on either mindless actions of other judges previously (I have not studied the cases you cite so I cannot say whether they were mindless as well) or, if the actions of the other judges were not mindless, you failed to see why you were being mindless in how you followed those precedents in the Expedia litigation.

I have been disseminating this citizen's letter to judges and feel the Expedia litigation in the King County Superior Court is an appropriate opportunity for disseminating my citizen's letter to judges at other Superior Courts in Washington State. I see from the Washington courts website that there are email addresses for emailing to judges at other Superior Courts, and I plan to send to them copies of this email to you.

I would like further to call this matter to the attention of Washington State state legislators, such as the judiciary committees. While I am not a citizen of Washington State, class action litigation such as the Expedia case has an effect nationally on consumers and investors, and I believe it should be permissible for out of state citizens to point that out to other state legislatures.